2011-07-01

BASIC STAFF - PART FOUR - USERS AS A RESOURCE BASED ECONOMY

In Part three, I have presented how the ecosystem of the web currently works. Of course in a very broad fashion....

Here, I would like to move a bit forward explaining how the whole system could be changed.

Any new product, app, partnership that is being presented to the public by the Big Guys, is nothing else but a way to attract more users, keeping the existing ones from migrating to other web based platforms, with the sole intent to generate more and more traffic on their sites. Thus attracting more Ads.

This is absolutely normal for a big publisher like Google or Facebook & CO. They are constantly looking to generate more profit. They need to do this. Among other reasons, they surely need to generate an up trend profit in order to pay the salary to the many thousands of people working for them.

The actual Resource they are benefiting from are, obviously, the USERS of the web !! So Humans.

In another contest, many other companies use natural resources to reach the same goal : generate a profit for their own corporations.

Being natural resources available in a limited way, the use of them needs to be rationed.The consequences of this process generates wide gaps in the Human society. This is a fact !

The web's natural resource to generate profit are Human beings. This kind of resource differs drastically from a "conventional" natural resource for many reasons. The most obvious are that Humans cannot be termed as a limited resource and that Humans cannot be mined or extracted and SHOULD not be traded.

But Humans and natural resources, have something in common : they can both be rationed.

Let's see how it works:

To ration a natural resource, implies a system to allow people to exchange the resource for something else, which is conventionally called money.
Human resources are also rationed by the same element which, again, is money.
This implies that a complex monetary system should take form.

Natural and Human resources, under the effect of the monetary system, are both bounded by the system itself. Also, they cannot be available for every body but only for those who can afford them. Therefore both resources are no more a common asset for all those leaving on this planet.

Well, let's get back to our core argument.....

On the web, users have the possibility to choose what they want. They are free, not bounded. Their choices can alter dramatically the fortune and the existence of any publisher.

Publishers, on the other hand , are fully aware of this and they compete with each other by inventing and promoting any sort of new idea in order to keep their own share of users and, possibly, increasing it.

In order to change the actual system, users needs to wake up and realize that they are MORE than a natural resource that can be rationed and bounded to generate profit for others.

If we manage to accomplish this, users will become a resource that is a common heritage, generating thus a Resource Based Economy by altering the way profits are currently distributed among the web operators.